With the bold act of signing on for a writing retreat we had renounced our daily lives, and even the lure of the beach.

Desperate to write, we had gone from stealing minutes from the rush of daily life to seven straight days of staring at a page or a blinking cursor.

But although each writer had come with a project burning to be put down on paper, going from stolen minutes to seven uninterrupted days was overwhelming, like being told, “Oh, go ahead, eat the whole Whitman Sampler right now.”

Confidence waxed and waned. But no one wanted to let go of the thread of their writing. The time was too precious and too hard-won. This was the one chance all year any of us had to say what we had to say perfectly and fully and without interruption.

Visits to the refrigerator provided an easy excuse to walk away, until one of the writers discovered a pulpy thesaurus among the popular novels on the bookshelf in the living room.

I noticed, as the days passed, the pilgrimages being made to the book increased. If the perfect word was not in there, an excuse for a moment’s pause from the difficult task of writing was.

My own job as writer in residence was to read the stories in progress and comment. As the week progressed I felt more and more saturated by the anguish and drama in the pages being handed to me. Maybe I didn’t need a perfect word, but I needed a break.

I purloined (stole, filched, lifted, swiped) the thesaurus myself and retreated to the porch. I opened the paper cover and stabbed the page with a finger. It landed on the word “joy.”

As I read the list, each word hit me a little differently. Some were notes played on a toy piano, others a baby grand. My respite from reading the writing of the group was to list these choices and explain what each meant to me:

Glad: Swollen but light, your heart rises in your chest like a helium balloon.

Ecstasy: This moment is all there is; the blood sings in your veins!

Exultation: Arms raised over your head, palms skyward, a beam of light through a chink in the clouds singles you out—you are the one!

Rapture: See ecstasy.

Delight: One of joy’s smaller forms, often used when not really felt, i.e., “I’m delighted to meet you.”

Happiness: Generic, plain-vanilla. Happiness looks like this : )

Enjoyment: Save this one for a good meal, an amusing comic strip, or a throwaway novel.

Felicity: Why did “bliss” not make this list? No problem. I’ll add it. “Bliss” and “felicity” both involve eyelids at half-mast and a dopey smile. Mood enhancing substances may be involved.

Glee: Only the young can pull off glee without embarrassment. It drives the body into antic motion (jumping up and down, throwing one’s arms in the air). Past age thirty-five glee will get you a free ride to the loony bin.

Cheer: A seasonal form of joy that smells of nutmeg.

Transport: Now the beam of Godly light mentioned in “exultation” is being operated by Scotty. The distance between your feet and ground is growing. Enjoy the ride.

I put the thesaurus back on the shelf and returned to a story in progress, this one about a girl who’s been raped. An excellent story, but I knew its author would not be looking for synonyms for “joy.”

I wanted to flag a page for her, underline the word “Hope,” and all its synonyms.

Note: For a more extended visit to the Fiction Among Friends writer’s retreat see my earlier post, The Writer’s Retreat. To learn more about joining the retreat visit http://www.persisgranger.com/ 

“Attitude” is a man hurtling toward earth. He’s fallen from a high place; not so high that death is certain, but it is definitely a possibility. What he does next is critical, how he arranges his body for impact will make all the difference.

The results of falling–or jumping–from a great height will always be bad, but how we choose to meet the moment of impact is up to us. Here are some attitudes that, while counterintuitive, often work.

Arms at your sides:

In my father’s last go-round with a heart that had been unreliable for more than twenty years he opted for a heart valve replacement surgery that had a 25% mortality rate. A glass-half-full kind of guy, he opted for the surgery, but right after the semicolon in his “let’s give it one more shot” declaration were the words; “and if it doesn’t work, I have no complants, it’s been great.”

He joined that 25% serene. Arms at his sides, he took what came without a fight, ceding his life back to the same force that had given it to him.

The struggle for immortality will always be lost, so when the time comes I hope I will follow my father’s example and not whine that I’ve been cheated. It happens to everyone so why not exit with grace? Death is only as big a deal as we make it.

Become your enemy:

You are your present self due to a fairly random series of situations. Alter the trajectory of the events and you could be almost anyone, even that jackass with whom you are now standing toe to toe. Instead of shouting in his face and resisting his arguments, matching force with force, tell your persistent righteous self to go silent.

Become, if only for a moment, the person you are opposing.

Believe, if only for a moment, that he is right and then imagine that possibility out loud.

Your “enemy” will lower his guard and there you’ll be, two humans staring at a shared problem, struggling with it together.

Stand up:

This one is very hard for a go-along person like me, but sometimes you must be the nail that refuses to be pounded in. You must stand stubborn for that thing you believe, or plant your feet and resist that act you can’t commit.

You may look around and see that you stand alone and wonder, why can’t I just sit down like everyone else? Wonder instead why it is so easy for them to sit.

Raise your eye level:

My mother had been in the hospital for a while making a slow recovery from a stroke. I returned home to work for a few days before going back. Then the phone rang. It was my sister. My mother had had another, far more catastrophic stroke, one from which she would not recover.

As this personal tragedy was being delivered I glanced out the window. The kids next door were jumping off the roof onto a trampoline. And I felt better. No matter how bad things were for me and the small circle of my family, life, in all its exuberance would be there when we came back to it. The rest of humanity would keep the lights on in our absence.

When life is most bleak look past your immediate surroundings and find the horizon.

Between you and that edge of the world are a million lives unaffected by your sorrow.

The machinery of joy still works, the enterprise of life goes on.

Take comfort in your insignificance.

Stare:

I’ve only managed this in those blessed couple of days that signal the end of a bout of flu. The throwing up, coughing, aches and fever have passed and sleep piles on like a down comforter.

But when awake, I stare at the water-glass on the nightstand or the weave of the bedspread, or the pinhole pattern of the ceiling tiles, and really see what is in front of me. It is a vacation from the chatter of everything all at once. It is as still and silent as this world gets.

Let out your breath:

You’ve been holding it for so long, as if with discipline you could control the things that should occur involuntarily. Some things are meant to take care of themselves.

Let them.

Note: I apologize for including the deaths of both my parents and one entry, but I learned from those experiences. Disaster is a stern but thorough teacher.

It rang beneath my shoes as I walked with my sister to the barren corner of Penn Lyle and Canoe Brook.

Standing at the bus stop, thighs pressed together, the wind funneled up our skirts. It chapped our legs from bare knees to panties.

The winter of my childhood swallowed the sun early and spat it out late. It clutched the day so close the sun could barely lift itself above the horizon.

It froze our eyelashes, our ears, our breath.

It wrote on our windows with frost.

It stole our mittens one at a time.

As Christmas approached we’d draw pictures of  blocky houses with skeins of smoke coming from their chimneys, snow piled on the roofs, the jagged green branch of a Christmas tree visible through the crayoned rectangle of a window. We’d glue on glitter to make the snow sparkle and we’d hope. A white Christmas could not be taken for granted.

Serious snow usually began after that holiday. When it came, we would watch the first flakes wheel down and announce to our dismayed parents, “It’s beginning to stick!”

Tar roads, at first just dusted white, were quickly erased. Parked cars became irregular hills. As we stomped our names into the dry new snow it squeaked.

Then it might warm little, the snow growing soft. Icicles hanging off a roof fascia dripped holes in the snow below. At nightfall it would freeze hard, crusting the snow with ice. Come morning the icy surface would briefly support our weight before giving beneath our boots with a satisfying snap.

More snow would fall.

And more.

The plows would come, clearing the road, but sealing every driveway on Canoe Brook Drive. My father, in shirtsleeves and sweater vest would attack the frozen pile with a shovel; this was what it meant to be an adult in winter.

But snow gifted those of us lucky enough to be kids with snow days, snow angels, snowballs, snow forts.

The crisp white life of snow was short. It got sooty and tattered. It congealed beside the curb with bits of trash poking out, and there it hung on through the bitter gray days of February and March.

My mother, casting about for proof that winter would end, offered a bounty for the sighting of the first robin and the first violet. Each could be redeemed for a cake.

By the time the patchy snow that lingered longest under the pine at the corner of the house finally melted and it was at last time to bake for robins and violets and begin to sew Easter dresses we had all earned spring.

As it unfolded its green shoots and warmer days we breathed deep, tied our sweaters around our waists, and turned our faces to the sun.

This is the inexorable course of winter as I remember it.

Here in Florida, winter is the season of forgiveness, our reward for surviving a summer that stuns us with its heat, dazzles us with its brightness, and only grudgingly gives way to the first breath of cool.

A slow dimming of summer’s green is what passes for fall colors here. We blink, and stir, and feel a sense of ambition that has been little more than a dead fly on a windowsill all summer.

In Florida winter is sissy-cold. The bird bath may freeze, but by ten it will be a murky puddle again.

We visited winter this year, going north for family, staying for ten days cantilevered off Christmas. But our experience of winter was only as real as the wishful drawings we used to make  of snow-capped houses.

We dabbled at being cold, watching the snow fall on the other side of my sister’s kitchen window. We have become tourists of the season, undeserving of the return of robins or an inconspicuous purple flower which, when pinched between cold fingers, would be rewarded with cake.

Note: To experience the season we are really good at here in Florida please read Summer in full.

“Josie will be an opera singer at the Met, or a dancer with the ABT,” my mother proclaimed.  ”Or a gold medal figure skater.” She was gifting Josie with the possible futures she herself held most dear; she could wish for nothing less for her first grandchild.

I never got to express my hopes because fairy godmother, Ray, said “… or a Senior Clerk Typist.”

My mother whipped around and stared, as if her fellow fairy godmother had said, “I gift this child, the most precious ever born, with… a toaster oven.”

Josie had done nothing so far but get born, but our hopes for our children–and our hopes for ourselves when we are young–are Macys parade balloons. Big and gaudy they strain at their ropes, they bump into light poles.

Ray’s gift was was permission to be ordinary, his way of saying, no matter what you become it will be okay.

My mother was saying, at this moment anything is possible. Why not dream big?

No one can predict who will grow up to be Elvis, Einstein, Hemingway (one of the single name people). When life is ascending it seems as if any one of us might be the next. Since we live in a culture that prizes the unquantifiable something that made Elvis Elvis nearly all of us hope that lightening will strike us or our children, that someone we love will go nova.

We don’t honor the glint that is in each of us, the song worth singing, the good idea. Maybe it is these small glints taken all together that are the true wealth of humanity. Our riches are jointly held.

My mother’s dreams for me were the same as the dreams she expressed for my daughter. It was Carnegie Hall and Metropolitan Museum of Art all the way. And her dreams came true!

Sort of.

I have spent my whole life doing the kinds of work that produced Picasso, Hemingway, Elvis, but unlike them I have worked the carnival circuit of the arts, driven the back roads in a dented VW camper.

I have run a small art gallery in the Florida Keys where I sold my paintings but made far more money on hand-painted clothing, I’ve written several books for young readers, and made music everywhere from a spot beside a dunk tank to the Monticello Opera House.

And I have been happy.

But how? I’ve never been the most famous or the best. Take music. In bumping around, singing anywhere that doesn’t have a sign expressly forbidding it, I’ve discovered that every third person is a dynamite musician (there is plenty of competition for that spot beside the dunk tank).

If I compared myself to even the most local talent I would shut my mouth. It isn’t hard to find someone with a bigger voice, the ability to hit higher notes, someone who is much younger, aspirations still on the rise.

Luckily, I consider making music a venture we undertake together. I appreciate your song, you appreciate mine. This is an addition problem. The sum of all our talents exceeds the value of one Elvis.

At the library I found a CD recorded by Eric Burdon.

Never Elvis, still he was a star in his day, the lead singer of The Animals.

Forty years later his voice is less pitch-secure but wiser.

It still has the bite and grit that made “House of the Rising Sun” a hit in 1964 and compelled me to picked up a guitar and sing in the first place.

The recent album probably sold modestly, but the hit potential of continuing to record was not the main thing.

Whether popular or overlooked, Eric Burdon is a singer.

I’m a singer.

You’re a singer.

Elvis is Elvis.

Thankfully, the job of being Elvis falls to a scant few. Fat Elvis. Thin Elvis. But was there a happy Elvis?

The job of being larger than life messes with the possibility of a livable life. Most of us are better suited to being ordinary.

Whether we perform to applause or indifference—even eye rolling if we have kids—what  is most important to discover is who we are and to be that thing to the best of our ability, whether it is Elvis or a Senior Clerk Typist.

Note: Josie now has a PhD, she’s published her first novel and she is the mother of a boy who will probably invent cold fusion or discover sentient life elsewhere in the universe (why not dream big?).

Just like women, they can be friends, associates, competitors, neighbors.

What I wonder about is the brand, MEN: the hype, the front, the public face of the gender.

I’m not sure your PR person is doing you any favors, guys.

If you are a member of the supercategory, MEN, you may wonder about some of this yourself—I appreciate that living up to the manly hype is hard work and that you (the individual) may have opted out.

Still I have questions (I inquire on behalf of that other well-established brand WOMEN, Inc.). Please answer as honestly as the secret oath of Club MEN allows.

Is romance something invented by females that you play along with? Do we fall in love with who we imagine you are—and do you let us?

Do you know how many points you’d gain if you liked to dance?

Do you resent the fact your wardrobe is drab and unexciting, or does one of us on your arm do the trick without all the fuss?

What do you really talk about when it’s just guys? Not sports. That’s just a smokescreen thrown up to keep us guessing, right?

Does walking a poodle embarrass you? Ditto a Chihuahua.

When we ask the girl question, “What are you thinking,” are you?

Are those decisions you seem to make with such confidence arbitrary (do you have some internal paper/scissors/rock routine you run when confronted with a choice)? To be blunt, are you making it up as you go along?

Why is it that the more powerful and successful you are the less you can actually do? (Unstop a toilet, wire an electrical outlet, cook an omelet). And why are you so proud of your ignorance?

You do know that when you cross your legs we can see your socks. Your white socks. Your short white socks. Your hairy legs.

We consistently outperform you academically. We’re more diligent, more reliable, and easier to work with. Why are you still in charge?

What you do with all the tears you are not allowed to cry? And if you were allowed to cry, would that obviate the need to go to war?

Is your first thought really, I wonder if she’d go to bed with me? A guy told me that was thought numero uno, but maybe that was a guy joke.

Powerful and in charge–and yet you are slavishly willing to wear a necktie.

We accept your shortcomings. Ugly? Short? Fat? Old? Bald? We give you that generous blank to fill in: other. Tell us what you’ve got, we’ll overlook almost anything, especially if you make us laugh. I have never figured out the biological advantage of a funny mate but we all want one. Not joke-telling funny, just someone who can make the hard times less hard.

Why are you so unimaginative when interviewing us for a spot in your lives? Why do you look so hard at the package? We have lots of “other.”

We can be funny too.

Note: Feel free to answer or contradict my questions–or ask your own. WOMEN, Inc is a far from perfect brand. What’s with purses anyway?

at this lit screen.

Letters shimmering

like heat off asphalt.

Cursor ablink.

A building gutted by fire,

the site of the opening

of a letter bomb

is my head.

Acuity diminishing

foreground and background

become subtly woven,

hard to tease apart.

I must worry information

off the screen,

gather the tasteless, touchless,

silent syllables.

If a LEM module crawling

the dead-sea-floor of my skull

scooped a sample

would tests reveal that life

had once existed there?

Note: This poem was written when I was a gainfully employed cubicle dweller who shared the space with the great grey eye of a monitor with weak green neon letters and a cursor that pulsed as slowly as a medicated heart.

Some weeks–this week–life is so overwhelming that all I can do is run to the file of some past self and say, “Give me whatever ya got.” 

You have it.

I have it.

Maybe not the step-in-front-of-a-stranger-and-take-the-bullet kind; courage can be modest and expended for causes much less worthy.

The first person we prove our courage to is ourselves–followed closely by our friends.

That show-off courage makes us jump off the high dive, a bravery that only has to last a nanosecond. Gravity does the rest.

Physical courage is almost always an exercise of youth testing the limits of that way-cool body they’ve been given.  ”Hey, let’s just see what this baby can do!” The reckless use of equipment that might be needed later (knee joints, spines) doesn’t much concern the young.

But the young are not always the ones who challenge themselves to show physical courage. For a person who has centered their courage in physical prowess it is hard to let go.

Diana Nayad, now 62, plans to make another attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida. Because marathons are based on discipline, strategy, and breath, they are an old person’s game she says. Her careful breathing has been stopped by stinging jellyfish on past attempts. Still, she plans to try again.

We, who have also left the quick-sprint time of life will cheer her, and secretly wonder if she needs to test her courage elsewhere. After all, courage provides an array of tests some of which actually favor the old.

Courage that benefits self also goes by the name of confidence. Confidence allows us to sing in public or walk into the boss’s office and demand a raise. It is not necessarily realistic. Maybe we don’t deserve that raise, maybe we sing off-key, but without confidence we will never know.

Courage grows more noble as it ripples away from self.

The phrase, “the courage of your convictions” names a courage drawn from the profound belief that something larger than self is worth taking a risk for.

Arm in arm, emboldened by the rightness of their cause, civil rights protesters sang “we shall overcome.” And for their belief they were hosed, tear-gassed, jailed, lynched and murdered.

Individuals died for the cause, but their conviction lived on. Their collective courage overcame.

Without a committment to something outside ourselves we tend to become complacent, easily led, selfish, small.

Me, I believe in kids, so I open my house (turned library) for the kids in my neighborhood every Sunday. This may not sound like a courageous act and compared to the courage of a Dr. King it’s small-potatoes, but it’s courage nonetheless. What if a child gets hurt and I get sued and lose the house? What if I learn something about the family life of one of these children and have to call Child Protective Services? What if? What if?

The more we open ourselves to the needs and lives of those around us the more vulnerable we become.

Faithfulness and repetition are the hallmarks of a type of courage many of us don’t even honor with that name. If you’re caring for a sick parent, bringing food to a neighbor who is out of work, raising a child who is not your own you are courageous. Weary and often disheartened, you do it day after day after day. The quick act of bravery looks easy in comparison.

Most of us will never be given that step-into-the-path-of-a-bullet test of courage. But our lives administer more ordinary tests every day—and no one passes them all. The driver who treats the ragged man with the cardboard sign as if he were invisible may be the same guy who volunteers for Hospice.

Some of us have a lot of courage, some just a little . Don’t underestimate what can be done, even with just a little. Mighty Mouse was a superhero—but he was also a mouse.

Courage, like the loose change in your pocket, travels with you. It’s yours to hoard or spend.

Go on, spend it.

Note: Okay, I know that Mighty Mouse isn’t real, but the fact that his creator, Paul Terry, chose a mouse is interesting.  How can you beat a mouse if you want an underdog hero? Actually, Mighty Mouse started his superhero journey as a fly…but that’s another story.

This was the year I would be proven smart, become confident, figure out what the popular kids knew without even trying.

Just because it never happened before didn’t mean it wouldn’t. This time would be different…for sure.

Although short on courage, I faced the scary-unknown with hope and optimism. I still do.

My high expectations make me a sucker for new beginnings, clean slates, starting over. Each is a chance to recast my story and reach the happily ever after just crowning on the horizon.

These start-overs abound. You just have to be open to them.

As hard as it was to whisper my sins to the shadowy priest behind the perforated plastic barrier in the confessional, I loved the buoyancy I felt when I got up off my knees, my soul white as a bleached sheet wind-dancing on the line. This time I would really not fight with my sister. I would be respectful to my mother. I would help around the house.

In honor of my freshly laundered soul I would be charitable, non-combative, sweet, helpful, respectful, until I was overcome with the need to fight with my sister. Like the first stain on a good dress it seemed to invite others. I didn’t resist the next fight quite as hard.

On a Saturday of my mother’s choosing I’d drag my muddy soul back to church, open the heavy door to the confessional and kneel.

Although they are largely artificial I continue to believe in new beginnings.

I like Mondays. With each Monday I assume I’ve been issued a whole new week. This week I’ll really accomplish something!

But the new year is my favorite clean slate. Fifty-two weeks, untouched, have just been dropped off the truck with my name on the box! They’ve even  thrown in an additional day at no extra charge .

I could never treat a new year as if it were more of the same.

Resolutions must be made. A tradition in my family, resolutions were always written down by my mother. Some were funny. One year my baby brother’s resolution was to quit sitting in the onion drawer. Some were sad because, although they repeated year after year, they always went unfulfilled. Even a novelist, which my mother was, could only find so many ways to say that her husband would lose weight in the new year.

I’ve come to understand that the force of a resolution depends on the desire of the resolution maker—my father went along, but the wish that he get thin was really hers. My dad made his own weight-loss resolution after a serious heart attack. Kept it too.

A resolution must originate with the resolver and arise out of desire, not guilt–my mother made resolutions for me that were just as effective; I still haven’t learned my multiplication tables and I feel guilty about it, but not guilty enough. A year is too long to be motivated by guilt.

It is easy, flipping through my mother’s old ledger, to pick out a resolution I made myself: This year I will sing as well as Judy Collins (1968).

I still hope for this kind of alchemy but I’ve realized that it is better to resolve to do actions, not state an intended outcome over which I rarely have control.

This year’s singing resolution will not be to sing as well as Judy Collins or anyone else. It will sing scales for twenty minutes every single day. I bet Judy does.

Even something as simple as singing scales for twenty minutes a day will be hard. A year has a mind of its own, disasters happen, things change. But to the best of my ability I will put in my time. Sing scales. Live up to the action verb of this resolution.

The year gets tattered as it wanes. Resolve grows tired. The obstacles that always lie in wait show themselves. The resolutions of 2011 have expired. I lived up to some, others make me shake my head.

But a new year has just been delivered! I’ve been thinking about resolutions for the last few weeks. I’ve committed a dozen to a page in my journal. A dozen is not so many. A year, especially one this new,  is commodious with room for everything.

And scale singing is only going to take twenty minutes. a day.

Packed in our carry-on bag is a tile grinder and a microscope.

What devices of mass destruction might they resemble when viewed on the ghostly black-and-white TSA screen?

We take off shoes, empty pockets. We enter the new futuristic scanning tube one at a time and stand, arms raised. It takes a good twenty minutes to move fifty feet, but our carry-on luggage makes it through; we must be entering the national transportation system at one of its soft spots–or else the screener is an out-of-work biologist who knows a microscope when he sees one.

Either way, we’re in.

In where?

An airport.  We could be anywhere in the developed world, where every airport is a cool, almost clinical space.

Lots of chrome. Lots of easy-wipe surfaces, everything stripped down as if the entire enterprise were a polished tube travelers are meant to pass through with as little friction as possible.

We sit at the gate, boarding passes ready. Although designed for flow, an airport is also built to temporarily warehouse human inventory until it can be shipped to its destination.

Other forms of travel may still involve sturdy shoes, water dripping off a canoe paddle, a paper map, choices. Air travelers are little more than cargo.

But we are balky packages, wired for complaint, and for blatant disregard of the airport’s intended flow. We don’t always read or follow signs.

Today, with passenger numbers at an annual high the system will be tested.  We are all traveling with just one purpose. Christmas. And we are all dragging too much, each of us hoping that our own personal too-much will fit in the overhead compartments.

It won’t. So we are issued yellow gate-check tags but forget to tear off the perforated yellow tab at the bottom even though we have been reminded that “many bags look like.”

No surprise, today’s is a full flight. We pray for modestly sized butts in the adjacent seats. As I squeeze into 5D I’m reminded of the space allotted a laying hen, which is something less than one square foot.

The passengers around me collectively ignore the flight attendant’s safety dance, their eyes glazing in preparation for sleeping in the upright and locked position. But I watch because I can see two flight attendants doing the ritualized moves, as synchronized as a pair of ice dancers. In tandem they demonstrate the operation of the seatbelt buckle, information long-ago encoded in human DNA.

As they dance, a disembodied voice warns us to turn off electronic devices and store smaller items beneath the seat in front of us, going on to say, “If you are in the bulkhead seat there is no seat in front of you, so please do not try to store your smaller items under the seat in front of you.”

The jet engines roar and the wheels grumble toward our assigned runway. None of us know the number of that runway, or care. We are as incurious as the small items stored under the seats in front of us.

I drink a complementary ginger ale. Doze. Seventy miles out of Charlotte we begin our descent.

Charlotte is a blast of cold air as we walk down the steps in the bright sunlight. Not bothering to look at the tag, I grab my gate-checked bag, which does not look like other bags, at least not exactly. Mine has a white scuff mark on one corner.

Freed from the plane, those of us not needing special assistance behave like electrons, jetting along, repelling each other just enough to avoid collision.

We stop momentarily to check the glowing boards to confirm our next gate because “gate changes are frequent.”

Cell phones pressed to ears, passengers hang onto the thin thread of connection to their lives in the real world.

They tell someone at the other end to defrost supper.

They talk business, reminding themselves that they are important, in fact vital to some critical enterprise elsewhere.

For me the cell phone has done away with the one charm of airport life, the sense that I’ve stepped outside the space-time continuum. I used to believe that the rest of the world could be vaporized and the airport would go right on peddling Cinnabon’s, making announcements about blowing up unattended luggage, beeping the less able to their gates on golf carts.

The concourses roll by, along with the scent of cinnamon and hotdogs. We are hoofing it to Concourse C. The rug is worn in places, confirming that although we flicker along fast we still have weight and mass. We do exist.

We arrive at the gate with an hour to burn. Those with even more time have already opened their books.

As a writer I’m depressed to see that as always, just a handful of titles are being read. It is a rare traveler who did not get the message, this Christmas we are reading “The Help.”

We board a second flight. This time when the flight attendants dance I join those who do not watch. I drink a second complementary ginger ale.

We fly in over the gray winter landscape of Baltimore/DC our plane’s shadow out-running the tiny cars on the highway below.

We assiduously follow the signs to baggage claim passing gates where people sit on the floor, read board books to children in strollers, check the departure time for a flight that goes to the place we just left.  Florida.

And now we are out at the curb, checked bag reclaimed, carrying a tile grinder and a microscope.

Delivered like a shipment of baloney or paper towels, we head toward Christmas.

Note: On the return trip Ray was singled out for additional screening. While he was standing in the tube, arms raised, the screener had detected “five anomalies.” Don’t be alarmed. Ray was thoroughly patted down. America is safe from the wad of paper towels in his pocket.

Except for a very painful hand surgery my husband had in September, 2011 has been a straight stretch of river that flowed smoothly, allowing us to go on about our usual business of growing vegetables, singing, building fires in our wood stove, writing stories, talking to our dog Moo, watching our grandson acquire language—and opinions.

And each week I have posted to this blog, often wondering what I would write about–until I noticed a spider or remembered some long-gone uncle and found a place to begin.

My husband, Ray, saw each of these essays first, sometimes questioning my premise, always holding me accountable for making sense. When a post passed that test I’d take a deep breath and click “Publish.”

And then it was your turn.

All of you who have read this blog and commented have enriched my year immeasurably with thoughtful conversation. When I started Slow Dance  Journal I never anticipated the wealth of stories I would hear, the philosophical wonderings the posts would elicit, or the fact that a community built in the air could feel so real, so present.

Thank you. You have given me new things to think about and confirmed my belief that telling the story of what it means to be human and alive is a collective venture.

May this holiday season bring visits from those we love, if only in memory. I know my grandmother, Nana, will be at my elbow when I make the traditional Christmas pound cake. The Swedish aunts and uncles will once again argue over the right time to put the lid on the pot of flaming glogg (the aunts enjoying the beauty of the flames, the uncles wanting to preserve the alcohol).

May this season bring us closer to friends almost forgotten, lonely neighbors, strangers encountered on the road. May we slow down enough to let the spirit of the holidays overtake us.

May we hang our hearts with the same abandon and generosity we hang ornaments, putting them within easy reach, accessible to chance encounter.

May we face the future with open arms and an understanding that even the most ordinary day is a gift.

Best wishes fellow travelers.

Adrian

Note: The homemade wooden cat, circa 1925, was my dad’s, probably made by an uncle. If I were to speculate, I’d say that uncle was Teddy, the carpenter in a trio of brothers who all went into “the trades.” The cat was the kind of Christmas gift you could find a pattern for in a magazine. The eyes are thumbtacks, the nose, is the head of a nail. The nail itself is the fulcrum which allows the cat to cock its head and wag its tail–as if a cat were undignified enough to wag.